How Moving to the Cloud Helped Craft the Ideal Fan Experience for Ticketmaster

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Every year, Ticketmaster helps hundreds of millions of people get into live events in 19 countries around the world. Each of these memorable experiences depends on Ticketmaster’s ability to manage massive stores of data in many diverse types and formats. Getting fans into the events of their dreams also requires harnessing insights from this data and sharing these findings across the Ticketmaster organization, its parent company Live Nation Entertainment, and with venues and promoters.

However, according to Ticketmaster Director of Database Solutions, Shawn Moon, the company’s data management system had become too complex to achieve critical business goals. The organization had data everywhere, from many different sources and on different platforms and with different schemas. There were silos of data between teams, and creating a cohesive report with information from different systems was very difficult. The company realized that it needed to simplify and modernize its analytics systems to optimize performance.

I felt very comfortable in saying, ‘Yes, we can do this in less than three months.’ And Teradata didn’t let me down.

“You need a platform that is responsive and fast, and grows with you, as your data grows and as your demands grow, so that the questions that the teams will be asking tomorrow can still be answered on the platform you have today,” says Moon. “These days, you just can’t afford a big, long process.”

Making the Switch and Moving to the Cloud

Ticketmaster decided to upgrade all on-premises data to the cloud and they asked Teradata to help them. Close collaboration between multiple Teradata and Ticketmaster teams across Networking, Applications, ETL, NPARC, and Security was key to minimizing downtime and costs. In only 10 weeks, Teradata upgraded Ticketmaster’s entire production, development, and disaster-recovery systems to a Teradata as-a-service environment in the cloud – on schedule and on budget.

“Teradata’s become a very trusted partner of Ticketmaster,” says Moon. “We knew that they would come through. I felt very comfortable in saying, ‘Yes, we can do this in less than three months.’ And Teradata didn’t let me down.”

There are many beneficiaries of Ticketmaster’s move to the cloud, including its finance, accounting, and marketing departments as well as venues and promoters who now have easy access to a wide range of robust data about fans. Ticketmaster is also delivering reporting faster to internal teams as well as to their own clients. The company is now better able to track user activity data on its website to understand where customers drop off before making a purchase and what changes could lead to a better fan experience.

“You need a platform that is responsive and fast, and grows with you. These days, you just can’t afford a big, long process.”

Gaining More Flexibility and Generating More Customer Demand

Ticketmaster’s upgrade to the cloud has also given the company the ability to respond to frequent changes in sales cycles and resource needs. Because Ticketmaster’s typical sales cycle for an event can be erratic — demand can spike sharply in a very short span of time when tickets go on sale, for example — the cloud allows Moon and his teams to adjust infrastructure utilization accordingly. “We can spin up resources; we can shut them down,” he says.

Gaining more flexibility and visibility into all their data is also enabling Ticketmaster to generate more customer demand for their offerings. Now that the company can ingest and bring together new types of data, including social media, Ticketmaster’s marketing teams can send targeted offers to customers about shows and events that are personalized, just for them. Now Ticketmaster can delight customers with experiences they may not have been looking for, but that they’ll love.

“By moving onto a cloud platform, we’ve taken ourselves out of the business of managing, upgrading, and securing hardware,” says Moon. “And then that frees up our resources to be able to work on more value-add tasks.”

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Brian Wood is director of cloud marketing at Teradata. He has over 15 years' experience leading all areas of technology marketing in cloud, wireless, IT, software, and data analytics. He earned an MS in Engineering Management from Stanford, a BS in Electrical Engineering from Cornell, and served as an F-14 Radar Intercept Officer in the US Navy.